Prime Video’s The Terminal List opens with a Navy SEAL platoon ambushed on a covert mission and ends with their commander hunting the people who set them up. In between, the show asks a question it never really answers: what is James Reece actually guilty of?
Trailer, via Prime Video.
Chris Pratt Plays James Reece
Reece is a Lieutenant Commander who comes home to his family carrying “conflicting memories of the event and questions about his culpability.” That is the premise the series hands to Chris Pratt, its lead and its biggest asset. The show was created by David DiGilio and based on Jack Carr’s 2018 novel of the same name.
Pratt plays Reece straight, and the show around him plays everything louder. Constance Wu, Taylor Kitsch, Riley Keough, Arlo Mertz and Jeanne Tripplehorn fill out the cast. The first season landed on July 1, 2022.
A Platoon, a Family, a List
The plot is a revenge engine and it runs on one fuel: Reece’s certainty. Once new evidence surfaces, he decides dark forces are working against him — against his life and the lives of the people he loves. He leaves the military’s command structure behind and applies “the lessons he’s learned from nearly two decades of warfare” to the hunt.
That is the whole machine. It has two settings:
- Reece finds a name.
- Reece removes the name.
There is no third setting, and no scene where the show seriously doubts him.
Two Seasons, Sixteen Episodes
Amazon renewed The Terminal List for a second season in February 2023. That season is set to premiere on October 21, 2026. The count across both seasons is 16 episodes, and the first aired in 2022 starting July 1.
The gap matters. Four years between seasons is long enough that a show has to earn its return, and this one is being asked to come back on the strength of a first season that never found a reason to be about anything except its own momentum.
The Ambush Is the Only Mystery
Here is the thing the series gets right, briefly. The ambush sequence and Reece’s fractured recall of it are the only parts of the story with any real tension, because they are the only parts where Reece doesn’t already know what he’s doing. He returns home unsure whether he is culpable. That is a character.
Then the show trades him in for a weapon. The premise promises an investigation into “the mysterious forces behind the murder of his entire platoon.” What it delivers is a list, and a list is not a mystery — it’s a schedule.
What the 4.0 Means
The Terminal List holds a Metacritic score of 40 out of 100. Our score is 4.0 out of 10, and the two agree for the same reason: the show is competent and empty.
Ranked against what it’s trying to be, the failures stack up in a clear order:
- It never resolves Reece’s culpability, the one question it raises with care.
- It substitutes procedure for doubt — every episode is a step, none is a reckoning.
- It wastes a cast that could carry the reckoning, including Wu, Kitsch and Tripplehorn.
- It ends a season with nothing left to say, then leaves a four-year gap before the next one.
Pratt is not the problem. He is a credible Reece, and the show knows it, which is why it keeps him moving. But motion is not the same as stakes. The series confuses the two constantly, and by the final episodes the list has become the only character with an arc.
What’s worth watching here is the opening and the ambush itself — a real piece of filmmaking about a man who can’t trust his own account of what he did. Everything after that is a delivery mechanism.
The second season arrives October 21, 2026, and it will have to do something the first one avoided: give Reece a reason to stop. A revenge story that never questions the revenge is just a body count with a title card. This one has the title card, the star, and the budget. It does not have the question.
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